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Look up at the night sky in 2020 and you might see an ad for McDonald's floating among the stars. A startup is planning to use a constellation of tiny satellites to create glowing ads. The satellites would light up different messages for up to six minutes at a time at about 250 miles above Earth.
Also at Futurism.
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Glowing Space Billboards Could Show Ads in the Night Sky
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Either I'm dead or my watch has stopped.
-- Groucho Marx's last words
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nuke on Saturday January 19 2019, @05:33PM (7 children)
I just watched their promotional video and the sky display is pathetically small. You could hardly make out what they were supposed to advertising. So why out in space? - don't these clowns realise that the further away something is the smaller it looks?
It was similar in effect to those banner ads towed by slow bi-planes that were a fad in the 1930's. I did once see one like that (in recent times!) and after a glance I lost interest, I could not even read what it said and I don't have bad eyesight. An aircraft banner would be orders of magnitude cheaper than this dumb idea. It's going no-where.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 19 2019, @05:50PM (3 children)
Let's wait and see. I presume the swarm is programmable so that multiple companies can have their reputations ruined.
And if it does work... maybe it can be hacked. Now that would be some fun.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Saturday January 19 2019, @07:27PM (2 children)
The best hack would be to instruct the cubesats to immediately begin a steep re-entry. Now that would both be an illuminated display worth seeing and a message with appropriate content.
--
What if there were no hypothetical questions?
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Saturday January 19 2019, @10:41PM
An appropriate message being this one [youtube.com]?
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday January 19 2019, @10:47PM
The best hack would be to have it advertise Anonymous, THEN doing the re-entry.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 19 2019, @06:52PM
This seems even less practical than using blimps or skywriting for advertising. It sort of works, but only because it's not common. If it becomes common, then it probably won't work for long.
Then there's the issue of ever increasing crowds in both airspace and orbiting around the planet. The last thing we need is a new iteration of water rights that becomes grandfathered in and then impossible to properly address even as it causes massive problems later on.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Magic Oddball on Sunday January 20 2019, @03:52AM (1 child)
The bi-plane banner ads were fairly common where I grew up in the 1980s, but they were very different from the few I've seen in recent years... The old ones were just a string of huge red connected letters with no background (like in this article [nytimes.com]), so they were really easy to read; the newer type are multiple lines (thus far smaller letters) in black on a near-square white background pulled by a smaller/thinner single-winged plane, and are difficult at best for me to read, too.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Sunday January 20 2019, @11:19AM
Not only is the plane-towed ad banner far, far cheaper, the noise the low-flying plane makes attracts attention upwards as well. I can't imagine many people even noticing these distant satellite glow-worms.